1. Technical Field
Certain embodiments of the present invention generally relate to power and thermal management. In particular, some embodiments relate to controlling the transient power consumed by a device in a computing system based on the characteristics of a power delivery system associated with the device.
2. Discussion
As the components of modern day computing systems continue to grow in functionality and complexity, computer designers and manufacturers are often faced with challenges associated with corresponding increases in power and energy consumption. For example, increased power consumption in a microprocessor tends to lead to a corresponding increase in temperature, which can negatively affect performance.
Some models for power and thermal control may monitor the running average power of a hardware device over a relatively large and dynamically adjustable window of time and maintain this average power at or below a given threshold. While such an approach can enable the device to consume above-limit power for short durations (as long as the running average power remains within the limit) without over designs on both device power supply and cooling solution, a number of concerns remain.